SIO413: The Search for the Man-Hating Feminist Continues

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 413. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and joined as promised, I'm joined by, uh, expert, our master, someone with a master's in in.

0:00:27 Lydia: Watch out.

0:00:28 Thomas: Yeah, exactly. Way overqualified here for every job. Lydia Smith, how are you doing?

0:00:34 Lydia: I'm good. I'm ready to do some more man-hating.

0:00:37 Thomas: Yeah. Well, maybe those, people the doing the studies need to just look at us then. Yeah.

0:00:40 Lydia: Should have just called me.

0:00:41 Thomas: Just ask, ask us. I am actually, truth be told, I am a little surprised about this, you know, like I'm surprised there isn't like some effect because course, listen to part one, if you haven't, this is part two on trying to find that white whale, that, that man hating feminist. If we could just cross tab the data a few hundred more ways or something, we will find this man -hating feminist. And so, this is Part 2. And I have to say, I actually am kind of surprised. Like, I'm surprised there isn't something here. I'm surprise there isn' like a distrust at least or, you know, anything like that. But, no, so far, not really anything.

0:00:41 Lydia: Yeah, Yeah. Yeah.

0:01:17 Lydia: Not

0:01:17 Thomas: Anything. On other hand, I think it's quite predictable that like, yeah, our society is geared toward men. And so all of our like implicit attitudes and all of us, you know, we're all swimming in the same cultural soup and we're All gonna have the same life. So in that sense, it's not surprising. But I have to admit, especially given that identifying as a feminist is, you demonstrated in the last episode, it is something that people look at at as quote unquote polarizing. Um, which I mean, you would think the people who still do self -identify that way might be even more self -selected into some kind of, you shared attitudes maybe, but, uh, but so far no. Oh

0:01:17 Lydia: Really. Yeah, yeah.

0:01:55 Lydia: Yeah, I mean, and you see that reaction, you know, among celebrities too. There's a Shailene Woodley quote where she did an interview with Time, and they said, "Do you consider yourself a feminist?" And she said, "No, because I love men, and I think the idea of raise women to power, take the men away from the power, is never going to work out because you need balance." And, you know, things Perry was like, "I don't know, I'm not sure, because I love men." And it's this.

0:02:18 Lydia: Yeah, it's potentially this misconception. I guess we'll see as we're going through the studies.

0:02:22 Thomas: My God. Yeah. Let's study it for a couple million more hours.

0:02:24 Lydia: Yeah. You Know, these are people who have platforms and voices and, you might be continuing something that's pretty harmful for the broader movement. I

0:02:32 Thomas: Yeah, shit. This just gave me an idea for, you Know, our other show where Where There's Woke, which you are on, can we do the same thing, but for wokeness? Like, I bet you they have where it's like, oh, it turns out there isn't actually such a fucking thing as the woke mob that cancels all of, you know, like it's all, it's pretty much the same. It's actually, now that I think about it, very similar. It's like wow, no, I'm not, and I bet there's even a ton, okay, hold on. I'm blowing my own mind here because I know this is the same exact, literally the same same exact thing where you you survey Democrats and you're like, do you consider yourself woke?

0:02:39 Lydia: Am.

0:03:07 Thomas: They'll be like, I'm not woke because I don't want to cancel all the blah, and then what if you study it? You'd be like, oh, it turns out no one wants that, like that's actually, and for the most part, all of those myths about what the woke mob are going to do, and I won't go too long here because this is our other show, I realized, but but it, but I genuinely now, like I'm kind of interested in if someone's done those studies, or if not, like maybe we should do them or something. Cause yeah, it really feels like the same issue. Um, then again, we are going to do at least three more studies here on finding that man hating feminist. So maybe I'll have to eat my words once we find them and then it'll be a different story. We'll see.

0:02:48 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah great crossover.

0:03:43 Lydia: Yeah buckle up you don't know. You don't know. So What we found, you know, in those previous studies was not what the stereotype would expect, right? And the researchers were saying, "OK, well, what is shaping feminist attitudes towards men?" They feel positively towards men, it's no different than how non-feminists feel towards men. What is shaping that attitude, and why has previous research been inconsistent with regard to the stereotype? Sometimes research would say, you know, feminists do feel a certain way about men, and then other times would say no, they don't, and figuring

0:03:44 Thomas: Okay. All right.

0:04:16 Thomas: Hmm.

0:04:17 Lydia: Out well, why can't we land on an answer here.

0:04:20 Thomas: That's weird. Cause it feels like we've landed on an answer that no, they don't, but okay. I guess that's not, you can only look at so many studies for a given show. So we, assume there have been some studies that said that, but I wonder, under, you know, we don't know the quality of those or not, I guess.

0:04:23 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Didn't do dives those on those ones.

0:04:34 Thomas: Yeah, sure. But also, I do want to just reiterate, you're saying there hasn't even been like, oh, it's just a small effect or, oh it's, because like we get that a lot with studies where it's like, yeah, okay, there's an effect, but it's you know one out of the whatever. It's enough to satisfy that like p -value thing, you now, and we're not even getting that here, right?

0:04:38 Lydia: Yeah?

0:04:55 Lydia: No, not from my read on this anyway. It's all been, you know, like when they do power analyses and things like that with regard to their sample size, the power's been really, you least average, sometimes, sometimes pretty strong to the effects that they're looking for and the effect sizes I haven't seen that are terrible anything of that nature. It's been just pretty kind of easygoing research. I don't know. Yeah. Let's see. So study four, we had to get another couple thousand participants. So we did 2,092 participants for this one.

0:05:22 Thomas: Yeah. You get a knock on the the door of a feminist that has like a you know like a pride flag and whatever, not gonna look man, I said, "I don't hate men." Are you still with this? Okay, god, all right, fine, I'll fill another questionnaire. "Now I donate men." I've told you so many times, no not exactly that, hmm that's an interesting selection, yeah.

0:05:30 Lydia: Yeah. Yep. Yeah, and so countries participants included in the study were from the United States, Poland, and the UK. And yeah, Who knows if it had to do with availability of the researchers and else they had on deck, if they were in the middle of grading finals or something. Who knows? They wanted to put together kind of this model to explain what's happening here. In this study, they also extended it to include other feminist ideologies. So the previous studies were, you know, focusing on kind of that standard liberal liberal feminism. But now they wanted to look at liberal feminism, radical feminism, cultural feminism, and women of color feminism, understanding that attitudes may differ based off of the of feminism that the person subscribes to.

0:05:51 Thomas: Okay.

0:06:25 Thomas: We're gonna subdivide, I mean, they have done some stuff to try to gauge, like, how feminist are you? Right. So, you know, and that seems to not even really have done much, but now they're like, well, maybe if we subdivide it differently, we'll find something.

0:06:31 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, exactly with that continuous measure. They wanted that maybe those negative attitudes are more prevalent within a specific subset of feminism, a school of thought or what have you.

0:06:50 Thomas: All right. Like the man hating. What's the, what's what's What is the Little Rascals thing?

0:06:51 Lydia: Yeah, the man -hating one. Yeah. The He -Man -Woman -Haters Club.

0:06:57 Thomas: Yeah, okay. Well, there you go. We need the She -Woman -Man -Haters Club. Maybe that school of feminism. Does that exist? Maybe.

0:07:02 Lydia: Yeah? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe we'll

0:07:07 Thomas: All

0:07:08 Lydia: Find out. Maybe that's the next sample that they grabbed. We have, you know, largely the same hypotheses hypotheses here that we did in studies one through three, absolute terms, attitudes towards men would be positive, that feminists would be less positive than non -feminists. And they predicted negative associations between feminist ideology, that liberal, radical, cultural, and women of color and attitudes towards women. They're just kind of keeping it consistent, even though, you know, There might be some thoughts maybe radical feminism has more negative attitudes towards men. They're just kind of aligning it with how they approach the previous studies.

0:07:45 Thomas: Right.

0:07:46 Lydia: Also had a host of other hypotheses related to threat, right? Because we're looking at that threat again, the realistic threat and symbolic threat. And they believed predicted that feminists related to non -feminists would report greater threat from men, but also greater similarity between men and women, that they don't necessarily see men as different from themselves.

0:08:11 Thomas: How are they doing that threat check? Is it like I picture it's men in black where Will Smith is shooting all the aliens or not shooting all the aliens? Is it that? And then there's men. I assume it's that. Or what is it?

0:08:17 Lydia: Yeah. No, we got a one through seven scale. No guns.

0:08:24 Thomas: Oh, okay. That's not as fun.

0:08:26 Lydia: Yeah, it's not as fun. So question or statements rather that are things like many women live in fear of men's aggression. Do not value child rearing as much as they should. So things, you know, that that are the realistic threat.

0:08:26 Thomas: Yeah. Oh boy. So things that are just accurate. Yeah,

0:08:41 Lydia: And yeah, you're a seven on all of those things.

0:08:42 Thomas: We're just gauging how, yeah. Well, it's like, yeah, no, that's true for sure. So do I hate men or am I just living in reality? I don't know. You tell me.

0:08:50 Lydia: Yeah, that's a good question. But, you know, I mean, maybe non -feminists also score those things pretty highly, too. It could be.

0:08:55 Thomas: Oh yeah. Okay. Yes. Cause you are looking for the difference. So we could all hate men equally, I suppose. Although we do tend to be finding that everyone loves men. It seems like from these, from studies. Yeah. Yeah.

0:08:58 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's true. That'S true. Overall positive, you

0:09:07 Thomas: Which, better, everybody.

0:09:07 Lydia: You know, but maybe it's like a I don't know, maybe it'S like a five,

0:09:10 Thomas: Do better.

0:09:10 Lydia: You know, out of seven.

0:09:11 Thomas: Yeah, we're not, I we're doing a bad job at these tests is what I'm saying.

0:09:17 Lydia: The other thing that they looked at was this idea of meta perceptions. So asking participants to say, well, what do you think feminists, you know, self -described feminists would feel towards men versus non -feminists? So kind of like turning it back to them and saying, what would you predict?

0:09:37 Thomas: Do you also think this stereotype? Yeah, I'm going to predict that they also think that stereotype. That's interesting. We'll see. I'm very curious about this one.

0:09:39 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And their final hypothesis here is that they expected ideological motivations like hostile sexism would be associated with participants' tendency to sort of endorse that misandry stereotype, which, you know, makes sense.

0:10:02 Thomas: Question here. What does it matter what their hypothesis is? I remember that's like the point part, of the scientific whatever you start with the hypothesis blah blah but at this point it's like well just tell me what the data said because I don't really care about your hypotheses but is it the kind of no we want to tell people what we're looking for and then if we don't find it that's you science and that's like you show of uh integrity in your study

0:10:03 Lydia: Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. I think it largely is that I think it's saying, you not just kind of going in and looking what we want. We're saying that we are making a prediction, we are willing to be wrong. And then, you know, like I mentioned, for the most part, most of these studies, they had pre registered their hypotheses, too.

0:10:22 Thomas: Yeah mm

0:10:39 Lydia: So I think it is largely for a show for integrity.

0:10:38 Thomas: Mm-hmm, gotcha it doesn't really affect like the data per se

0:10:43 Lydia: No, no. Affects how they would phrase their results.

0:10:43 Thomas: Okay cool yeah like. Like what questions you mean? Yeah, sure.

0:10:48 Lydia: You know, yeah. Hypothesis was or was not supported. As I mentioned here, there are lots of participants across several different countries, the United States, UK, and Poland. And here they they did pre -register their hypotheses. And that they did here, they did that dichotomous and continuous measure for identity again. Mentioned, oddly, and I'm just as an aside, and maybe some of our PhD folks, because I'm a master's, maybe some PhD folks can chime in on this. But in of the samples, They said that the male participants only did the continuous measure because of financial constraints. It was kind of, you know, I don't think anything is to be made of that. But, you Know, it's that integrity there, too. They're calling it out that if we were to ask for all their data, that would be missing. And they're saying, why?

0:10:48 Thomas: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Huh.

0:11:40 Lydia: Kind of.

0:11:40 Thomas: And it's just they prioritized the,

0:11:42 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. They prioritize the continuous over the dichotomous, which I think is.

0:11:43 Thomas: Yeah. No, I'm saying they prioritised non as the group they would, if they're going to shell out the bucks to like do that additional test, they're saying they only did that for women, right?

0:11:49 Lydia: Oh, to have. Uh -huh. Yeah, well, so they only did that for women sorry, they did dichotomous and continuous for the female participants, and then male participants completed the continuous measure. I feel like dichotomists would be cheaper, but they put their towards, like, maybe they had enough to do one of them and they wanted the more fine -tuned specific measure as opposed to dichotomies.

0:12:15 Lydia: Yeah, I don't know. I don' t know. Know. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

0:12:07 Thomas: Oh, yeah, oh, okay. That's interesting. Yeah, that seems weird. Okay. OK, or is it just because of the gender wage gap? They had to pay the men more.

0:12:24 Lydia: An extra quarter for every thing that they did. We have the feminist measure, feminist ideology measure. But as I mentioned, here we are including those subscales. So, we have that general liberal feminism that they used in study But now they're looking at cultural radical and women of color. And this is all from the feminist perspective scale, which is, again, a measure that is supported by research from 1998 and is continually used thereafter. After. Are additional subscales in that overall inventory that they chose not to use because one of them is called the conservative feminist subscale, and they felt that it did not actually measure feminist ideology.

0:12:26 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. I love that they have it. They have like, I don't know, one of those ghost meters from Ghostbusters or whatever. And they're like, this finds the feminist and they put it on Christina Hoff Summers. They're like fucking no reading. There's nothing. Zero. I can't even see her. Well, where is she?

0:13:20 Lydia: And then the other one is the socialist

0:13:29 Thomas: Sorry. Man, ma'am, you're not a feminist. I don't know what to tell you. The fucking machine never lies. I don't. Okay, I love that. Huh.

0:13:30 Lydia: Feminist which they felt was dated, you know, again, 1998.

0:13:40 Thomas: Interesting mistrust.

0:13:40 Lydia: And they didn't really feel like it was going to to yield much variance in responses, you know, take that as you will. It could be considered a limitation in their study, and maybe you disagree with that, but, you Know, that's what they chose to do. They looked at the explicit attitudes towards men, and then they looked at, again, that gender similarity using the inclusion of others in self -scale. This is something from 1992 and the measure of realistic threat and symbolic threat, well as as hostile sexism. And this is the way that hostile sexismo as a measure is conceptualized. It's from the ambivalent sexism inventory. And it's categorized as a mistrust of women who are seen As trying to take.

0:14:26 Thomas: Of women.

0:14:26 Lydia: Yeah. So this is not the the man side of things. This is hostile sexism. A mistress of women who are seen as trying to Take male authority by using feminism.

0:14:26 Thomas: Oh. Okay. Oh, so now this wasn't something we looked at before, right? Because now We're kind of testing the stereotype itself. To see, like, okay Okay. Interesting, yeah.

0:14:40 Lydia: Right. Exactly. Exactly. And So That's where that comes in relationship to that meta perception of non-feminist attitudes, saying that, you know, they had to complete the measures of attitudes towards men as they believed other participants in The study would have feminists And Non -feminists. And so they to specifically think about women feminists because the misandry largely based off of women hating men. Right.

0:14:45 Thomas: Yeah. Oh. I'm excited for This One, like You said a moment ago, here, you guys study it. I don't know. We can't figure this out. You guys answer this. I do not know.

0:15:14 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And OK, so what did they find for Hypothesis one, largely positive attitudes towards men, again, overall was present. In this study, they did have a slightly less positive. Attitudes towards women were slightly less positive than non -feminist, which is interesting. That's the first time that's happened. Was significant, but, you know, yeah, it could be. And then hypothesis three, which was looking at the different feminist ideologies, they found that all types of feminist ideology, except liberal feminism, were negatively related to explicit attitudes towards men. So that radical and cultural had less positive explicit attitudes towards men. Liberal feminism, not so much. And actually, women of color did not have a less positive, explicit attitude towards men when

0:15:38 Thomas: Is it because we keep asking them? They are like, fucking Jesus. All right.

0:16:12 Thomas: Interesting.

0:16:12 Lydia: They looked at this as a regression analysis. Analysis.

0:16:14 Thomas: Is It Worth Asking? How do they define this like liberal versus, you know, like I am kind of interested in that, but

0:16:19 Lydia: It's in that scale that I mentioned, and I don't have that handy, but it is a scale that was developed in the 90s that is continually used in research, and they have like sub -scales.

0:16:20 Thomas: Okay. Interesting, Interesting. Does that update? Like if you're, are you liberal for the nineties or are you progressing? You know, whatever. All right. I'll let that aside for another time.

0:16:35 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. They axed conservative and social, so maybe they thought, like, they weren't going to ax any axed. This, this does give some support that maybe the non, what they categorize as the non-mainstream feminist ideologies, that those could be associated with less positive attitudes towards men. Maybe this is where the stereotypes coming from.

0:16:56 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, well, Okay. I don't, I reject that, that formulation of it, because the stereotype is coming from fucking every single, everyone, right winger hating feminists. But I am interested if the result is, okay, if we, if we distill it down, if we get the, like, the most feminist people, maybe we can find some hatred of men. Sure, yeah.

0:16:58 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The burn-it-all-down types. Right. Then they looked at gender similarity and threat, and they were saying that women were going to perceive men as a greater threat than non-feminists. That was supported. They also, women feminists saw men as more similar to women, which was interesting. So they're you know, they don't see them as markedly different, but they do have a greater perceived threat to them. Yeah.

0:17:36 Thomas: That makes sense, that's funny. I mean, that makes sense with kind of what I've said in part one and earlier, like, that just the overall progressive stance that men and women aren't as different as the, the classic Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus bullshit, maybe.

0:17:47 Lydia: Yeah.

0:17:59 Lydia: Then we get to the that you're really excited about, the meta perceptions. Yeah, to how feminists actually felt warmth toward men, like their actual warmth scores, participants a whole substantially underestimated women feminists warmth toward men, right? They're embodying that stereotype, I guess, with their responses. And that was committed by not just non -feminists, but feminists too. Yeah.

0:18:02 Thomas: Hmm. Ah, yeah. Everybody, right? I knew it. Yeah, 100%.

0:18:28 Lydia: Yeah, so feminists expected that feminist women would feel less warmly towards men, even though they're also filling this out. Yeah I

0:18:29 Thomas: God, this is so fucking predictable. This is so predictable with my theory of the case that this is just because of specifically people like Kristina Summers and, you know, Bill Maher and all those and Fox News and all those people. That's what, like, are we just totally ignoring that there's a complete propaganda network and right-wing outrage complex tied to trying to make people be, and not to mention, incel YouTube fucking network of trying to making people be scared of feminists.

0:18:55 Lydia: Know, Oh, I know. Yep.

0:19:05 Thomas: Like, That seems to be what's crying out from all this data to me. Meanwhile, the people doing the study are like, "See, this does exist." They must have seen themselves in the paper, data been like, "I knew it, we didn't imagine this," I

0:19:05 Lydia: Yep, yeah.

0:19:19 Lydia: Then paired with that, so warmth toward men, they also overestimated women, feminists' perceptions of threat, so thought that feminists were more threatened by men, regardless of realistic symbolic, and underestimated their perceptions of gender similarity, so seeing men as vastly different than them, in terms of, you know, whether or not they identify with them. And pattern held regardless of you being a feminist or not a feminist, everybody saw that the same way. So we're on to study five. Yeah

0:19:51 Thomas: So study four, I guess, to put a button on it, like, it's basically exactly everything we thought, the set, nobody really hates men particularly, maybe a tiny, sounds like they got, like, maybe a little bit but also everybody thinks feminists hate men, okay, done, TLDR on that fucking thing, but we're still looking into it, everybody what are we what are you trying to do are these all the same people doing this, that's like the same endeavor kind of, it's not like you just collected six studies at random, this is like we're still going, so we're on study five out of six okay.

0:19:55 Lydia: Yeah. Be some subset. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right. So study five. We're still going to look into it. Well, I mean, it's split across a lot of authors, but yeah, it is it large is group. Yes. Yes no no it's all yeah still going. So with study five they said you know like we really relied a lot on convenient samples. See if we can, instead of, you know, studying students, let's see If we can get a nationally representative sample of UK adults, we're going to focus in on one country, and can we replicate what we're seeing in these previous studies?

0:20:49 Lydia: And so with this one, they had 1 ,953 participants. Nationally representative sample of UK adults on a variety of demographic They used the same measures in that previous study, study four, so the feminist ideology, et cetera. But they also incorporated two measures of that feminist collective action regarding Me Too, and then collective anger focused specifically on sexual misconduct. And

0:20:45 Thomas: All right, fair, fair enough.

0:21:18 Thomas: Hmm.

0:21:18 Lydia: Those are the questions that they're going to ask. So they had the same hypotheses, again, for one and two, that there would be positive, absolute feelings, attitudes towards men, and that feminists would be less positive than non-feminists. And then they also looked at the feminist collective action and anger that would be negatively related to attitudes towards women. Makes sense. You feel, you know, you participate more in collective action, you feel more collective anger, you're going to feel less positively about men. And that feminists would report feeling greater threat from men than non-feminists would, but greater gender similarity and those beliefs would indirectly predict attitudes towards men. Then they also looked at this meta perception again, too. They were like, "Oh, this is, you know, a really cool thing that we clued in on in study four. Let's do it again, I think it's a really cool approach to it." And their hypotheses here, yeah.

0:22:18 Thomas: If you want to just study where this bullshit thing you're trying to study comes from, I would love that. Like correlate it with Fox news viewership or whatever. And, and honestly it might, yeah, it might be interesting to try to figure out where it comes from because it's so ubiquitous. It would be a real look into how the right wing outrage machine works.

0:22:23 Lydia: Yeah.

0:22:35 Lydia: Yeah, a hundred percent, and what they hypothesized here is generally what we've seen and what we expect to see, that feminists are going to be perceived by the participants as having negative attitudes towards men in absolute, and then also in comparison to where feminists actually land in how they feel towards men. In the previous questions that they filled out, they also wanted to look at the ideological factors here for meta perception, so that the participants' feminism identification and their, their collective action score, I guess, would be associated with endorsement of the misandry stereotype. This was an online survey, again, understandable, with nearly 2,000 participants, you're, and trying to do a nationally representative sample of the UK, so, you know, not everybody's going to be available within walking distance to show up at your lab. And what did we find here? Results were largely consistent with the findings from studies one through four. Interestingly, in this study, when you're looking at a nationally representative sample, feminists reported slightly warmer attitudes towards men than non-feminists. Isn't that weird? Yeah.

0:22:44 Thomas: Sure.

0:23:45 Thomas: What? Huh?

0:23:47 Lydia: And they were like, OK, well, what's going on here? And they said, OK. Well, we pulled in men and women for this study. Let's look at that interaction. And yeah, it's just significant for male participants. So male feminists love men.

0:23:47 Thomas: Wow. Oh, so men love men. Uh, Okay. So I, so note I was way off off on my version, so you're saying specifically male feminists like men better than, okay. Than all other groups? Even, oh, wow, okay, yeah, all right, yeah, well,

0:24:04 Lydia: Yeah. Yep. Then all other groups. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's where they saw the significance there was particular to that, which, okay. And I mean, who knows if it's love, feel warmly towards.

0:24:25 Thomas: Is it answering those bullshit, what, questions? Yeah, I actually want to know, like, uh,

0:24:30 Lydia: It's those items that I read earlier. The example is just, how warm or favorable or cold, unfavorable do you feel towards men in general. That's the warmth towards men scale that they used.

0:24:41 Thomas: Okay. So it's not the, like, you should have a hot meal waiting for you when your wife gets home or when you get at home or whatever okay good

0:24:44 Lydia: No, no, no. No. No that was a different one. They didn't Use that in this study. Then the feminist collective action and anger was unrelated to warmth. So if you were part of, like, the Me Too, if, like, if you felt, you know, you were either posting a lot or supporting women a lot during Me Too, or the anger that you, you felt towards sexual misconduct, it didn't have any bearing on how you felt towards men in terms of those warm feelings, yeah.

0:24:48 Thomas: Huh?

0:25:11 Thomas: Again This all would make sense if the whole study was like, yeah, everyone hates men, but it wasn't, that's the thing, I'm still not that's interesting, okay.

0:25:17 Lydia: Yeah, and Then collective anger, you know, they just looked at, like, okay, let's confirm that this is related to feminism and it was related to feminist identity, as well as feminist collective action. And

0:25:28 Thomas: When you say related, you just mean correlates with, or do you mean they actually tried to find some causal

0:25:33 Lydia: Yes, yeah. No, no, all correlation here. And then in that meta -perception piece, participants, again, strongly underestimated their warmth towards men and overestimated the perception of threat and underestimated the reception of similarity. So within this nationally representative sample, for the most part, they replicated all of their findings from the previous studies with the caveat that male feminists like men feel strongly, slightly warmer towards men. Now we come to the final study.

0:25:37 Thomas: Okay, yeah, Geez.

0:26:04 Thomas: The Final study. I hope this one was like, so in this one, they're like, maybe we should study fucking climate change or something, just anything else, because this is pointless.

0:26:17 Lydia: No, so this one, they were like, OK, we have a lot of studies looking at a lot of people. Let's pull it all together and do a meta -analysis of all the work that we've done. So now we have, yeah, pretty straightforward. But now we have a sample size of 9,799. Just to illustrate, you know, how insanely comprehensive this was. That's huge.

0:26:27 Thomas: Alright, fine.

0:26:38 Thomas: But doesn't this just mean they're collecting what they've already done? In a meta -analysis, it's not like they're asking them new questions or...

0:26:44 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. So they're not going out again. No, exactly. But it's the total sample size. So we know what they're dealing with here. And then just to give you an idea of how the feminist breakdown was versus non -feminist in the sample size, those who identified as feminists were 3,935 of that 9,799 and 4,882 participants identified as non-feminists. Yeah.

0:26:47 Thomas: Yeah, okay.

0:27:11 Thomas: Interesting.

0:27:12 Lydia: So let's at men and women separately. They wanted to capture explicit attitudes towards men and women. Oh, that they used in previous studies also included things like liking and trust of women as well. And then they just weren't, you know, hypothesizing based off of that. But here they have an opportunity to say, Okay.

0:27:35 Thomas: Kind of revisit.

0:27:36 Lydia: Yeah. To say like, "Okay, let's examine how of our participants feel about men explicitly and how they explicitly feel about women." They looked at warmth toward men, liking and trust of men, and emotional reactions towards men. And then they also looked at warmth toward women and liking and interest of women. There was no emotional reactions toward women that they studied previously. So, they weren't able to use that. And also wanted to look at the meta-perceptions again regarding warmth toward men and warmth toward women. And what found in this was, you positive towards men, no significant difference between feminists and non-feminists. And women feminists were no more negative towards men than men in general were. So the quote that they use in the paper itself that I thought was a good way of describing this is that feminists are no more guilty of the charge of misandry than men are themselves. And I was like, that's a great succinct way. You know, we went through six studies here.

0:28:37 Thomas: Okay. Well, which is interesting though because

0:28:41 Lydia: But, yeah, it was men feminists do within one study did have slightly stronger.

0:28:41 Thomas: I thought the last one was that men did like themselves but I guess that's... Is that a different measure? Okay.

0:28:51 Lydia: But when they compile it all together, what they're seeing is that is there's no difference in how women feminists feel towards men than men overall feel towards women.

0:29:00 Thomas: Interesting.

0:29:00 Lydia: Then. Then they were, you of, feminism, understanding it's conceived as a movement for women, so they wanted to look at, okay, within within women participants, is there, like, this in -group love, are women harboring more positive attitudes towards women, and Well,

0:29:00 Thomas: Yeah. Pretty, powerful evidence. Yeah, No. I'm gonna go ahead and guess no, just me personally.

0:29:25 Lydia: So, there is overall positive attitudes toward women, but feel more positive towards women than non-feminists Do. Yeah.

0:29:25 Thomas: Oh, Okay, cool. Oh, Okay. Alright. I like that, good.

0:29:35 Lydia: Yeah, and positivity toward men and women were positively correlated for feminists. The warmer they felt toward women, the warmer they felt toward men. So they just like they like people better. Yeah, so what, what that shows here is that even if there is an in-group love, it does not mean that there is an automatic Like necessary outgroup hate, right? Then again, on the meta perceptions, um, saw what we, what we saw within those smaller studies, it was reiterated in the meta-analysis that participants perceived feminist attitudes toward men as negative, and warmth as more negative than they were actually, um, is, uh, we saw, as I said previously. So to wrap this up, we have a few things here, and I wanted to read a little bit from this study to just kind of help

0:29:35 Thomas: Oh, Okay. I Just like Everybody, sure.

0:29:57 Thomas: Right. Right. Sure.

0:30:26 Lydia: Put a bow on this.

0:30:29 Thomas: We didn't find the man-hating feminist today, but we know she's out there, she's still, we're gonna do another 12 studies, actually we're going to do another 6 studies, make it an even dozen. We'll find that man-hating woman, and someday, yeah.

0:30:38 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Across several measures and nine national contexts, feminists displayed strongly positive attitudes toward men when compared to meaningful neutral benchmarks, and there was little to no evidence that these attitudes differed from non -feminists or even men's own attitudes toward men. Second, participants, including feminist participants, incorrectly perceived feminists to hold negative attitudes toward men. Third, mediational analyses suggested that the closeness between feminist and non-feminist attitudes toward men might be explained by two opposing forces. Feminists at once perceived men as a greater threat to women, associated with less favorable evaluations, and also more similar to women, associated with more favorable evaluations. Fourth, turning to the mechanisms that cause myth and reality to diverge, the widespread misunderstanding of feminist attitudes toward men was associated not only with ideological antipathy to feminism, but also a false belief that feminists see men and women as especially dissimilar. Yeah, I thought it was great and

0:30:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:46 Thomas: Well, They got there in the end, I guess, yeah.

0:31:48 Lydia: Yeah, The last little line here is a disconcerting implication of the present findings is therefore that gender relations are being conducted in the shadow of a falsehood, yeah.

0:31:49 Thomas: Ah, You don't say, okay. You know, maybe they were in on it all along, I don't know, maybe

0:32:04 Lydia: And I think ultimately what they were coming from

0:32:05 Thomas: As They're walking away, whoever the fuck this is, they start to lose their limp, and it's like, wait a minute, they were Kaiser Soze, who knew that this was a bullshit thing all along, they know, they're not there with me, I think, is what the joke I was making. They were like, huh, we just can't seem to find this obviously fake thing.

0:32:11 Lydia: Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I don't totally know if we go forward a year if Christina Hoff Summers is going to change her position off of this incredible amount of evidence.

0:32:36 Thomas: I was genuinely, took me a second to realize you were trying to say that she might actually change any belief she has based on any. That's not, that's a joke that's too hard to even make. I didn't, I was confused by what you were getting at.

0:32:43 Lydia: I don't think she will, yeah. Yeah, But I mean, this is like, this is a huge effort, and the popular media, they are starting to present this, you know, I saw, like, uh, an article in Forbes, And And You Know spread it far and wide, yeah.

0:32:59 Thomas: I heard it on serious inquiries only. Get it out there, everybody. Like, fuck.

0:33:05 Lydia: But I, I genuinely don't think it's going to, I don't know, have an effect on the people who are already too far gone, I, and it's, it's depressing because the amount of time and energy and money, I mean, like, seriously, the number of, of, uh, researchers that were involved here, there's like a huge thank you section, you, it's incredible the number of people that spent their time.

0:33:12 Thomas: No.

0:33:29 Thomas: They built a large hadron collider to collide lied feminist particles with, you know, to try to find the man -hating, uh, Higgs boson or something, you Know, like, yeah, we really went all out for this obviously non -existent thing. Just saying that's

0:33:32 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of opportunity here to really sit in the work that they've done. It's been so incredible. And to really characterize misandry as a myth, the misandRY myth. It's not real. And we need to be able to figure out how to break it down and not let this cultural sort of misperception and honestly, probably specifically manipulated misperception seep into the minds of everybody. Because this idea of I'm not a feminist because I don't hate men, I love men, is not real.

0:34:27 Thomas: Nothing.

0:34:27 Lydia: It's not real, and there is now, you know, pretty strong evidence to support that, and if we're going to make a meaningful difference globally for feminism, it's important that we, you this apart and get folks to understand what feminism really is about.

0:34:27 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:45 Thomas: It'd be nice at the very least. Yeah, let's, let'S have our celebrities not give this line of fucking bullshit. That would be nice.

0:34:50 Lydia: Oh, I know. Yeah, it was like Kelly Clarkson. I'm hoping she's changed her position.

0:34:55 Thomas: Kelly Clarkson. She's my favorite celebrity. I don't, singer? Or okay.

0:34:58 Lydia: Well, Well, it's back in 2013, so hopefully she's come around. But, you know, it It's tough. Lady Gaga at one point said that she wasn't a feminist because she but she she has since uh her position on that

0:35:04 Thomas: Yeah. Frustrating. Oh, come on. She's like, no, actually now I hate men. Yeah.

0:35:12 Lydia: Yeah Yeah, exactly, unless they're Tony Bennett, she loves Tony Bennet, but yeah, um, some folks in the audience will will appreciate that, um, that's where we're at. And, uh, you know, nearly 10 000 people later, I think we have an answer. We're

0:35:28 Thomas: No fucking kidding. Well, this is, this has been great. I really appreciate you going through all that. Like enough of this, you know, enough of the stereotype, that feminists say. Yeah, it's like, I, on one hand, I think we all kind of knew this. On the other hand, I wouldn't have been surprised if there was some sort of suspicion you could measure or something. But, like, yeah, man, it's it's fucking dumb. So if you ever, hey, you're ever arguing with any conservative who makes a comment like this, you, they have the word factual in their fucking moniker, you can be like, oh, you know, they have a whole thing that looks at facts, it's called science, science. There's a booming, a promising new technology called science that looks at facts, and we don't have to just take them from an idiot talking head, anti-feminist. The people who look for facts found that actually, no, they don't, feminists don't hate men. So that would be something to try at your next, you-hateing gathering.

0:35:58 Lydia: Yeah, yep.

0:36:23 Lydia: You would think from someone who's been published in the New England Journal of Medicine once regarding animal rights would know that. So just saying.

0:36:33 Thomas: All All right. Well, thanks so much. You want to plug?

0:36:37 Lydia: Where there's woke. Yeah everybody chant. Can't yeah as you're driving maybe

0:36:42 Thomas: Everybody, I better hear it out the window, I don't know, yeah, no, go check out Where There's Woke, everyone, and thank you so much, have a happy holidays and new year, and let's all start hating men more, actually, that's a, I'm gonna, yeah I know, I mean, I I'm going to, you a quick, I juked you, you know, like this, I actually, we all need to answer these questions more accurately, which which is we should be more suspicious of men in general. But no, barring that, thanks so much for coming on.

0:36:55 Lydia: That's the takeaway yeah yeah thanks

0:37:09 Thomas: And everyone, find Lydia at another really cool podcast. I think she says Where There's Woke, if I remember the name correctly. And we'll see you next time, everyone.

0:37:08 Lydia: For having me yep yep join master lydia smith over at

0:37:38 Thomas: That. Yeah. That was just for you.

0:37:40 Lydia: Yeah, thank you. So